Three legendary Black female singers—Tina Turner, Dionne Warwick, and Gladys Knight—have won a combined total of more than 20 Grammy Awards and 60 nominations, amassing hundreds of millions of record sales over decades. They spanned the genres of R&B, rock, gospel, pop, and soul with ease, and have transcended personal tragedies while they continued to perform for over 50 years of sold-out crowds of fans on multiple continents.
After a tribute to the lives and music of Aretha Franklin and Miriam Makeba last Sunday, we continue our #BlackMusicSunday series with, as promised, more of the legendary voices of soul and song. Like Franklin and Makeba, these superstars were born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Unlike last week’s divas, we are blessed to still have all three of them still with us.
In Tina Turner’s life story, we see a woman who managed, against the odds, to come out of the other side of abuse and go on to craft a major career for herself that’s spanned decades, though she’s long been retired. The story of her time with Ike Turner is the stuff of movies—literally—but there’s so much more to her life, both before she met him and after she left him behind. Did you know she’s a citizen of Zurich, for instance? This 10-minute interview from June 2019, with CBS This Morning’s Gayle King, was an eye-opener.
I don’t think anyone who ever saw Tina Turner when she was still attached to Ike ever thought much about him at all—the high energy that she generated was breathtaking, as anyone who remembers hearing “Proud Mary” for the first time can attest.
I just got a chance to take a look at a combo concert footage documentary I hadn’t seen about her life and career.
The Girl From Nutbush is a music documentary, which traces the amazing life of Tina Turner from her humble beginnings in the Tennessee cotton fields to the world's biggest concert arenas. It coincided with the release of the hit movie What‘s Love Got To Do With It, Tina‘s first U.S. tour in 6 years and her new release on Virgin Records, the soundtrack album What's Love Got To Do With It. It features exclusive interviews with her friends Cher, Ann-Margret, Mark Knopfier, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Elton John, plus a surprising and candid interview with Ike Turner.
What’s Love Got to Do With It, the Academy Award-winning biopic starring Angela Bassett as Turner and Laurence Fishburne as her husband Ike is a film I have never forgotten.
Film critic Roger Ebert raved about the film when it came out in 1993.
"What's Love Got to Do With It" ranks as one of the most harrowing, uncompromising showbiz biographies I've ever seen. It is a tradition in the genre that performers must go through hard times in order to eventually arrive at fame, but few went through harder times than Tina Turner. The movie shows Ike, jealous of her talent and popularity, turning into a violent wife-beater, and it shows her putting up with a lot more than she should have, for a lot longer…
The movie is unflinching in its willingness to show that Tina, like many battered wives, made excuses for her violent husband and believed his apologies and gave him more chances, long after she should have walked away. Finally she finds the strength to resist through Buddhist meditation techniques, and there is an unforgettable scene late in the film where she is about to open a big engagement and Ike slips past security and into her dressing room with a gun, and she finds the inner strength to face him down and not cave in, and go onstage like a professional.
"What's Love Got to Do With It" has a lot of terrific music in it (including a closing glimpse of the real Tina Turner), but this is not the typical showbiz musical. It's a story of pain and courage, uncommonly honest and unflinching, and the next time I hear Tina Turner singing I will listen to the song in a whole new way.
The 1984 video and single “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” which provided the title for the film, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1985.
Probably the complete opposite of Tina Turner in style and song choice is Dionne Warwick. Though only about a year apart in age, they came from different worlds … and arguably, ended up in different worlds as well.
Warwick began singing during her childhood years in East Orange, New Jersey, initially in church. Occasionally, she sang as a soloist and fill-in voice for the renowned Drinkard Singers, a group comprised of her mother Lee, along with her aunts and uncles. During her teens, Warwick and her sister Dee Dee started their own gospel group, The Gospelaires. Warwick attended The Hartt College of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, and during that time, began making trips to New York to do regular session work. She sang behind many of the biggest recording stars of the 1960's including Dinah Washington, Sam Taylor, Brook Benton, Chuck Jackson, and Solomon Burke, among many others. It was at this time that a young composer named Burt Bacharach heard her sing during a session for The Drifters and asked her to sing on demos of some new songs he was writing with his new lyricist Hal David. In 1962, one such demo was presented to Scepter Records, which launched a hit-filled 12 year association with the label. Known as the artist who "bridged the gap," Warwick's soulful blend of pop, gospel and R&B music transcended race, culture, and musical boundaries.
In 1970, Warwick received her second Grammy Award for the best-selling album, "I'll Never Fall In Love Again," and began her second decade of hits with Warner Bros. Records. She recorded half a dozen albums, with top producers such as Thom Bell, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Jerry Ragavoy, Steve Barri, and Michael Omartian. In 1974, she hit the top of the charts with "Then Came You," a million-selling duet with The Spinners. She then teamed up with Isaac Hayes for a highly successful world tour, "A Man and a Woman."
In this eight-minute 2019 interview with CBS News’ Mo Rocca, Warwick reflects on some of the people who had a hand in shaping her talent.
If Warwick seems unclassifiable, unique in sound and style, it may be because of the surprising variety of musical mentors who raised her: Her godmother was jazz singer Sarah Vaughan (“She was Aunt Sass to us”); Ol’ Blues Himself took her under his wing (“Frank Sinatra, who I affectionately still refer to as Poppy, I became his surrogate child”); screen legend Marlene Dietrich taught her how to dress; and Lena Horne, who, she says, gave her the most valuable advice of all: “Always, always be you. You cannot be anyone but you.”
Warwick also reveals that, like Tina Turner, she didn’t choose her own stage name. Despite the fact that she’s approaching 80, Warwick’s six-decade career continues: She still performs and just released a new album.
When I read through Warwick’s list of hits with my husband we both broke out into song, amazed at not just how many hits she had, but also that we remembered all the words. This 1970 Kraft Music Hall medley with Burt Bacharach will remind some of you as well.
Warwick’s fourth single, “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” made a strong impression on me when I was a senior in high school. Like most teenagers, I was suffering a heart-rending crush on someone … and I played this song over and over.
Anyone who ever loved
Could look at me
And know that I love you
Anyone who ever dreamed
Could look at me
And know I dream of you
Knowing I love you so
Anyone who had a heart
Would take me in his arms and love me, too
You couldn't really have a heart
And hurt me like you hurt me
And be so untrue
What am I to do?
Warwick would go on to become a pop phenomenon. Unfortunately, her life has been filled with family tragedy; most notably the death of her cousin Whitney Houston, followed by the death of Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown.
But Warwick has also sought to offset tragedy with a commitment to a number of causes, among them world hunger and HIV/AIDS. My fondest memory, as an HIV/AIDS activist, is of this 1985 collaboration.
A single recording performed by Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Gladys Knight to benefit AIDS research was released yesterday.
All profits and royalties from ''That's What Friends Are For'' - including those of the performers, of Arista Records, of the song's writers and producers, Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager, and of the publishers and the musicians' union -will be donated to the American Foundation for AIDS Research. The foundation is the merger of the AIDS Medical Foundation of New York and the National AIDS Research Foundation in Los Angeles. Its national chairman is Elizabeth Taylor.
As noted in Warwick’s interview with CBS News, “That’s What Friends Are For” went on to be 1986’s most popular song.
Twenty-six years later, they reprised the coming together in this 2011 benefit performance featuring Elton John, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder.
That reunion is a perfect segue to introduce, last but not least, the youngest member of today’s group: Gladys Knight.
Knight was born on May 28, 1944, into a family that was part of Atlanta's growing black middle class. She began her musical career at the age of four with a church recital, then toured and sang in southern churches with the
Morris Brown College choir, an Atlanta gospel group, from 1950 to 1953. As a seven-year-old prodigy, she achieved national recognition by winning top honors on Ted Mack's
The Original Amateur Hour, a popular
television talent show in which winners were selected by mail-in votes.
In 1952 the family music group was born during a child's birthday celebration at the Knight home. Joining an impromptu performance with Knight were her older brother, Merald "Bubba"; her sister, Brenda; and two cousins, Elenor and William Guest. From these humble beginnings, the Pips emerged—the name was taken from the nickname of a cousin ("Pip") who encouraged the youngsters to become professionals. After the departure of Brenda and Elenor, cousin Edward Patten filled out the family quartet during the group's heyday.
By 1957 Gladys Knight and the Pips were touring nationally on the "Chitlin' Circuit," playing exclusively to black audiences in clubs and theaters throughout the
segregated South. During these tours they performed as the opening act for some of the biggest names in
rhythm and blues—Sam Cooke, Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett,
Otis Redding,
Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, and B. B. King. In 1961 the group scored their first rhythm-and-blues (R&B) top twenty hit with "Every Beat of My Heart."
Coming in at just under two minutes, the song tells a relatable story.
Knight’s website documents her stellar career which, like Warwick’s, continues today.
All told, Knight has recorded more than 38 albums over the years, including four solo albums during the past decade: “Good Woman” (1991); “Just for You” (1994); the inspirational “Many Different Roads” (1999); and “At Last” (2001). “At Last” showed the world that she still has what it takes to record a hit album, employing the talents of contemporary producers like Randy Jackson, Gary Brown and James D.C. Williams III, Jon John, Jamey Jaz, Keith Thomas, Tom Dowd and Tiger Roberts...
In 1986, she produced and starred in the Cable Ace Award-winning “Sisters in the Name of Love,” an HBO special co-starring Dionne Warwick and Patti LaBelle.
I’ve now watched Sisters in the Name of Love several times, and will be watching it again!
“We thought we’d get together to do this because we’ve always wanted to,” Dionne Warwick said, as the audience cheered the arrival of fellow legends Patti LaBelle and Gladys Knight. “We’ve never been on the same stage before!”
It was July 12, 1986. And the occasion that brought three of R&B’s greatest voices together for the first time was Sisters In The Name Of Love, an award-winning concert special that itself has become legendary.
[...]
Created by Knight and produced by her brother Bubba (a member of Gladys Knight & The Pips) … the 90-minute special was recorded before a live audience at the historic Aquarius Theater in Hollywood and includes performances of fifteen rhythm & blues, soul, gospel, and pop classics. Warwick, LaBelle, and Knight – with a collective 80 years in show business between them at the time – share the mic for a dozen songs, and each performs an extended solo number. They even bust out some choreography to the delight of the enthusiastic audience.
It’s an hour of Gladys, Patti, and Dionne on the same stage, peppered with “kitchen-table” conversations.
Knight’s life has not been a fairy tale; her first husband was addicted to drugs and died young. Knight also struggled with a gambling addiction, which she details in her 1997 autobiography, Between Each Line of Pain and Glory: My Life Story.
As Chicago Tribune staff writer Allen Johnson wrote at the time of publication, Knight’s public persona belied battles she long kept private.
Knight has been known throughout her career as something of a "good girl," a person with a wholesome image who has never been the subject of controversy. Yet the image gets battered somewhat in "Between Each Line of Pain and Glory: My Life Story" (Hyperion), Knight's new autobiography. The title is lifted from the lyrics to "Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me," which, along with "Midnight Train to Georgia" and "I Heard it Through the Grapevine," remains one of her biggest hits.
Knight reveals a side that most of her fans have never known. It includes a gambling addiction, a teenage pregnancy and miscarriage, and a first husband whose drug dependency helped destroy their marriage. The book ends with her separation from husband No. 3, motivational speaker Les Brown, after only a few years.
Typically, though, Knight, believing she is "spiritually and careerwise" moving into a higher level in her life, believed it was the right time to bring her story to the public, even if it was difficult airing some of her dirty laundry.
"God has given me a blessing," she explains. "My thing is to bring His joy, His word, my songs and all of that, to you. So I don't bring my life, I don't bring my woes, my troubles to you when I come into your space or your life. I want to be uplifting you."
VH1’s Behind the Music produced this documentary on Knight’s life and career in 1998, including “rare” footage, and interviews with Knight herself, her peers, and her family.
For a great Knight concert, this 1997 performance at the White House is “a pip.” The “Georgia” medley is worth the wait.
I love the moment when Knight says, “We can make a difference … but we have to stop talking, and start doing.”
Join me in the comments to share more music from soulful sisters born in this era. As we face hard times in the days ahead, I hope they will not only lift your spirits, but provide some motivation to keep on doing.
